Hey there, wellness entrepreneur. Welcome back. So you might hear it in my voice, and I apologize. I am getting over some type of virus or bug. I think I picked it up in my travels, and it kind of came on quick at the end of the week. And over the weekend, I was down and out. Fortunately, I was able to take a lot of time to rest and replenish. And Monday, I was feeling so much better, and I didn’t have a fever on Sunday at all.
So I was definitely progressing each day—it went by really quickly. But today, I’m dealing with some lingering congestion. Anyway, that’s where I am, but overall, I feel much, much better, and I’m motivated to show up to work. I am just working with my energy levels and what shows up day to day as it progresses, which I’m sure you’re aware of.
It just kind of caught me off guard because, from an entrepreneur’s perspective, I’ve been really lucky. In the last several years, I haven’t gotten sick or had a real fever in many years. Maybe I started to think I was invincible with all my travel, and I was getting away with a lot.
So this kind of just caught me by surprise and brought me back into my humanity. And I think we all need a little bit of that from time to time. But this week on the podcast, what we’re talking about—because we are officially, as I’m recording this, into summer—I just got back last week from my daughter and my summer trip to Florida, which really was a blast. And on the longer side, which was really nice. But what I see often with entrepreneurs is two sides of the coin. When it hits July, often, sometimes it’s often full panic mode about the summer slowdown. And so I see entrepreneurs trying to escape that or beat it by working harder, picking up all the subbing opportunities possible, posting twice as much, launching random offers, hustling to make up for what you might think you’re losing if your schedule or revenue starts to trickle and slow down.
And what happens then is you end up exhausted, your family’s annoyed, and ironically, your business just doesn’t grow quickly in the moment with all that hustle sometimes anyway. Or version two—it’s July, and you’ve completely checked out of your business. So no posts, no emails, no planning, and you tell yourself you deserve the break. And you do.
But here’s the thing—if you are in business, you want to still have your doors open for business. Otherwise, it’s like a plane lifting off—you have to relaunch, which requires a whole bunch of energy and momentum and output. Plus, to your audience, it breaks that trust with them because they want a practitioner that they can rely upon, that they know will be there consistently for them if they have questions or if they purchase a package—they’re not just going to ghost or disappear.
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Plus, you might be secretly panicking when you do take that time off—that your audience will forget that you exist and that you will have to start from scratch, which is valid, right? So we’re going to talk about those extreme approaches, also in relation to summer and also your goals for the fall. Because I know fall is a very popular time—you know, back to business, back to the momentum. There’s Christmas and an energy in the air where people are very motivated. It’s a great time to launch, especially online programs.
But here’s the truth:
To be successful in the fall, the work starts now in the summer. But you don’t have to overwork. You really can truly enjoy your summer and have your highest revenue months. In fact, my month of June was one of my highest revenue months. Yeah, I had a really great month, and I took almost two weeks off. So it is possible to do both.
But what is helpful with this is planning and creating a runway for yourself. For myself, when I’m most successful—and when my clients are most successful—is when they’re giving themselves time to do this work without a lot of pressure, which can be an energy leak and actually cause you to be slower in the end.
So whether you’re the summer hustler, because you’ve heard of the dreaded summer slowdown and you’re terrified and you’re working overtime to beat it—you’re launching flash sales, picking up those subbing classes, posting constantly, trying every new strategy, working longer hours—but you’re feeling exhausted, your family feels neglected, and your heart’s sad because you want to enjoy your summer with your family.
Or maybe you’re the summer shutter, and you’ve decided summer’s off-limits for your business and you’ve stopped posting regularly, stopped nurturing your email list, stopped thinking about your fall goals, and you tell yourself you’ll restart everything in September—but you’re secretly worried that your audience will forget about you.
Here’s the truth about both approaches: they’re both fear-based reactions that hurt your business in the long term.
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The summer hustler is operating from scarcity—the fear that if you’re not constantly pushing, your business will fail—and that often leads to burnout, decreased quality, and resentment from your family, or maybe resentment from you to your business.
And the summer shutter is operating from avoidance—the fear that business and summer can’t coexist. And that leads to lost momentum, forgotten audiences, broken trust with the audience, and the very real need to put energy output to rebuilding everything from scratch.
And both extremes are missing that strategic middle ground where your biggest opportunity lies.
So let’s talk about that. We’ll call it the summer strategy sweet spot—the approach that lets you enjoy summer while building momentum for your biggest fall yet. And you can even have your biggest summer yet. And it’s operating from these three core principles.
- Maintenance Mode Marketing. I often call this the bare minimum, so you can head back to past podcast episodes where I talk about the bare minimums. I often teach it to my clients. But it’s not about disappearing; it’s about finding a consistent, sustainable schedule that keeps your audience engaged and lets them know that energetically, the doors to your business are still open and plants the seed for your launch—that’s not in an overwhelming way.
- Strategic Foundation Building. So instead of trying to sell more or completely shutting down, you’re using summer’s natural rhythm to build systems and content that will power your fall launch.
- The Launch Prep Timeline. So you’re not launching anything major in summer—you’re putting out your existing offers. And by “major,” I mean a new offer. But you could do new workshops or smaller things like that. You’re not doing a full launch in summer, but you’re strategically preparing for the most profitable quarter of the year—fall.
Or sometimes, for some people, the most profitable quarter is actually the last quarter during the holiday season, when there is a lot of buying going on. But you’re preparing for both—or one of those—when your audience is actually ready to buy as well. And in summer, they can be ready to buy as well.
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Like I said, June—I had a really, really great month. And it was from people looking to start in the summer, now for specific reasons. And so, you would just have to speak to those reasons as to why someone would want to improve their health and wellness in the summer—what’s in it for them to start now versus the cost of waiting with their health for the fall?
And it’s not about working more or working less hours. It’s working strategically so your summer feels spacious and fall feels more inevitable.
So let’s break this down. When you nail this summer strategy sweet spot, here’s what becomes possible for you:
You maintain your momentum without burnout. Your audience stays engaged and grows throughout the summer, and you’re not sacrificing family time or your own well-being to make it happen. September then becomes the strongest launch month for you ever.
You don’t have to launch something new—it can be launching your existing one-to-one offer, for example, or an existing group program that you already have, but maybe in a slightly new way or with a slightly new workshop, or just updating a sales page or a webinar page. Slight changes where it feels new to your audience or speaking to messaging to your audience in a way that you’ve never done, or marketing in a way that you’ve never done—something that maybe feels different.
That can be a lot of fun and create momentum for your audience. But starting to plan and integrate or process what that might look like for yourself can start now in the summer.
We are going on a camping trip in a couple of weeks. Sometimes I don’t love all things about camping, and we definitely do it Southern California glamping style.
But I do love to get out into nature and the spaciousness of being out there and disconnected. Where we go camping, the Wi-Fi is not great or reliable, so we are disconnected from electronics.
I often bring my journal, and in the morning, we have a little McLean rhythm where my daughter plays or rides her bike around the circle thing of the campground. She often meets new friends, or sometimes we have friends that come up with us, and they play together, or she meets other friends at the campground, so she’s often off doing her thing.
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My husband often sleeps in, and so I have an hour or two in the morning where I often will journal and think and integrate—sometimes just for myself and my own personal evolution and growth, and sometimes for my business, where I’ll think about things like this:
Okay, what do I want the end of the year to look like for me? If I am launching the Instagram Message Makeover Clinic again in the fall, what do I want that launch to look like? Who’s the person I want to attract? What does this look like for my business? What’s my day-to-day?
I like to think about that and brainstorm and integrate.
And then I’ll often go for a walk afterward or a hike, and I’ll seal it into my nervous system and further visualize it—maybe listening to music. Sometimes I can’t get to the music or a podcast because of the internet. So I really use the quiet time to embody this for myself. And I feel like this process is so strong for me in the summer, especially on a camping trip.
So you can really use your vacations or car travel time, or airport travel time, to create space for you to embody what you really want to create for the second half of your year. And the cool thing about this is when you are having this balance of integration and testing, self-growth and nervous system, and planning for yourself and working—and knowing that when you’re off, so when I come back from the hiking trip, my solo hiking walk, for example, I often then—we do something as a family, so my business brain turns off, and I move into more family mode now.
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And I can do that easily because I have integrated, I have processed, I’ve embodied it—what I want to create, I have it written down. So my nervous system and my mind trust that I’ll come back to it in the journal, and I know that now it’s in my cells from hiking. So then I can be fully present with my family if we go to the beach or the pool or whatever we decide to do for that day.
And my husband loves that ’cause he feels like he’s put first. My daughter loves it ’cause she feels like I’m truly present and having fun with her. And we create fun memories. Like last year, I remember we went to the community pool where we were camping, and they had a diving board.
So I don’t know if some of you know, but I was a Division One diver. I dove all through high school and college. And to get on the springboard again—oh my goodness, how my body has changed. And you cannot dive in a two-piece, so I didn’t realize that they had a diving board, but we did have some fun memories of me jumping off the diving board in my two-piece and losing my suit. So this year we will be bringing one piece.
But my daughter did her first dive ever off a springboard. How fun is that? So we’re going to go back up there, and you can create moments and memories like that to cherish forever.
And when you find this balance, you break this extreme feast and famine cycle—the dramatic ups and downs—and you create more steady, sustainable growth that really does compound over time. This is how I’ve grown year after year. Just like last episode, the 300th episode, I really speak to how I’ve sustainably grown year after year, so you can do this as well.
All right, so let’s talk about implementation. Strategy one—this is the Maintenance Mode or the Bare Minimums: figuring out your content plan. So instead of posting constantly or maybe engaging a lot or completely disappearing, you find that summer consistency. So maybe if you’re used to posting three to five days a week, you’re posting one to two times a week. Or if you’re doing stories most days, you’re just showing up occasionally to stories.
So when I went to Florida, I did a lot of scheduling out of my reels, and I really backed off stories, but I was still able to show up consistently.
Now, my overall views—they did take a hit. They did drop both in the overall number of views (my monthly views) and in my daily reel views. But I still had a couple of reels that did really well—5,000, 6,000 views—but then a few of them really bombed at three or four hundred, or got stuck at six or eight hundred views.
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And that’s mostly just because I wasn’t able to engage, ’cause I had them scheduled and I wasn’t engaging as I normally do, so the algorithm picked up on that. But as soon as I came back and got back into posting live and reengaging with my audience and new people outside my audience, then my numbers took right back off again.
So it was a way where I could still show up. I still have consults booked. In fact, I had a lot of consults booked while I was travelling and gone. Some of them I did manually enter. I did pop in and check my emails when I was in Florida, ’cause we were gone for so long. And I did schedule some, but some were booked on their own.
So the cool thing is I came back, and my Instagram is doing better than before, and I have a bunch of new consults in the book, which is exciting—to look forward to working with these potential clients. Instead of coming back to crickets and an empty calendar, which can produce a lot of anxiety and fear in your business and kind of break trust even with yourself and your business, you can create sustainability, and you can do this as an entrepreneur, right?
So you want to figure out that maintenance mode content plan for yourself, and what it looks like, and how you can make that happen through utilizing the scheduling tools available, for example, within the apps.
Okay. The other thing is the foundation-building focus. Now that you’re hearing this, you’ll be aware of yourself—if you’re hustling or hiding—and it’s knowing that it’s not just you. A lot of other practitioners, right, are either hustling or hiding. If you are aware of this, you can be a step ahead in the game and really position yourself and stand out more by creating a strategic foundation, especially if you’re travelling in the car or on the plane and you have extra hours of time.
Yes, watch a movie, hang out with your family, read a mindless book—I did a lot of that. In fact, I read two fiction books while I was in Florida. But you can also use the time to do some auditing of your business.
So audit current systems—what’s working, what’s not? Plan your fall signature offer. What transformation will you provide? How can you help these clients hit that result? What can you promise? You can create your fall launch timeline—when will you open? When will you close? What assets will you need?
You can start to build your launch content—bake emails, posts, workshop outline, workshop registration page. So for me, when I went to Florida, for example, I knew what days I was off and I knew what days I was working. And I built in three hours of admin time to do some things like this on one of my days, where I was doing calls.
Fortunately, my sister was in town, and she was able to take my daughter to a fun one-day Sky Zone trampoline experience, and another day snorkelling. So she was having fun and getting to have some bonding time with her aunt, and I got to do some planning ahead in this area.
I also did scheduling—some content and making some reels on the plane. I just connected to the Wi-Fi. And also, as I said, I took some time on the plane to read and just connect with my daughter when she wasn’t watching a movie. So I really feel like I had a great balance.
And when we go camping, it’s a little bit different because it’s a short commute, short drive. It’s not that long at all, we’re not going far. And there is no Wi-Fi, so I will make sure that my emails are scheduled out, my posts are scheduled out, and my podcast is scheduled in. Those bare minimums are done for myself, and I will be taking more time off.
Compared to the Florida trip, it’s one week off versus almost two weeks, so I will be taking more of the time off. However, when we go into town, a couple of times I will check into my client DMs and just make sure that they’re doing okay. But the majority of the time—I would say 95% of the time—I will really be off this trip, except for that visualization and that planning with my journal and check-in with my clients.
Versus Florida was a little bit more strategic in actual client work. So you can have trips where the balance is a little bit different, or day-to-day, even if you’re doing staycations.
There have been a couple of summers where San Diego—and we’re doing this a little bit in August—where we’re having some staycation days. So you could do this. If your kids are home from camp, and you just want to have fun with them and play tourist in your town. It’s deciding this for yourself, too—when you want to work, what does that look like for yourself?
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And then strategy number three is the audience nurture strategy. And that’s how to keep your audience engaged without overwhelming yourself. So you can choose some evergreen content themes that you rotate through, like behind the scenes of your wellness routine while travelling, or while camping. Make it time-relevant.
Summer health and wellness tips—how you handle health and wellness with summer, with changes in schedules. You can tell some client success stories and testimonials, which you want to be doing all the time. Quick tips that never get old. Your own business journey insights. Gentle teasers about what’s coming for fall.
So there are ways to keep your audience nurtured and engaged. And you can schedule all this out. So if you do want to go completely unplugged, you can. But again, the doors of your business are still open. The beauty of this system is that you can create content around these themes anytime, anywhere.
Maybe go to a coffee shop during summer camp pickup, or an hour before summer camp pickup and do this, or during kids’ quiet time where they’re playing independently, or early morning before anyone wakes up.
This is especially important if you’re wanting to launch a group program, an online program in the fall. This is where the planning really starts now, in both the content that you want to put out in the fall, so you’re not having to scramble and do a lot of it. So, when are you going to create that content ahead of time?
The planning of a workshop or registration—when you might want to do that? So, for example, in my upcoming fall launch, I have a couple of collaborative partners I’m working with, so I get exposure to different audiences. And I’ve been planning that work. In fact, yesterday I was on a call with one of them and we were planning out—
And this is exciting for you—a collaborative webinar we’re going to be doing in August. So I am planning things now for my launch in the fall, and it just makes the whole launch process so much easier. I’m also starting to write out my emails for my fall launch. I think I might be doing a workshop.
A workshop prior to my launch, and what the topic is, and building out the registration page. I’m doing all that now so I can submit it to my coach sooner rather than later and get feedback, and then start scheduling those out as well. It just makes the fall so much less stressful and more consistent, and I’m really able to be more focused and present on my client calls.
So if you’re really considering launching that online program, the work starts now and getting together that plan now. And you can do that. Just borrow those pockets of time. And if your brain tends towards that scarcity thinking—mine does—like, “What if I lose money if I’m not hustling?” It’s hard to take time off, or if you’re feeling guilty, it’s just remembering that when you show up rested, happy, fulfilled, your body will be happy, your wellness will be better—unless you pick up a bug travelling like I did. But it’s rarer for me. I did a lot of travelling recently, and this is the first one.
But most of the time, we come back feeling replenished, renewed, energized for our calls, refreshed. So it’s going to create a sustainable business and a better quality of work for your clients. Because when you’re dragging, when you’re tired, if you’re starting to feel resentful of your business ’cause you’re overworking, your clients will feel that too. And your creative thinking on the spot to problem-solve for them, I can tell you truthfully, it’ll be so much better when you’re refreshed and energized, right? You just have more brain power.
If you feel worried about not posting as much or as constantly, and you’re like backing out if you’re doing five days, I kept mine the same. I just scheduled them out. But let’s say you didn’t have time to create as much content and you just reduced the frequency a little bit from like five reels a week to two or three—remember, your audience often doesn’t see all your reels anyway, the way the algorithm is. So sometimes they don’t even notice the difference. And when you post that next reel again, it sometimes is stronger. Or maybe those reels will do well because there are fewer of them and they’re more potent. As long as you’re still showing up and not completely ghosting, your audience won’t notice a subtle change.
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Or if they do, they’ll be ready and waiting and watching for your next one when you do show up. That is the key about consistently showing up—is because they trust and know that you’ll come back because you’ve never fully ghosted them before. Now, if you have stopped and ghosted, that’s okay. You can rebuild the trust, right?
We all have to start from somewhere.
And if you feel guilty for taking any time away from your business, this is just a reframe of what working on your business means. Strategic foundation building, taking time to care for you, is working on your business so you can have a business. Because if you’re not rested and replenished, you might get burned out and sick, not able to work in your business, or you might give up on your business ’cause you are so burned out, and then you won’t even have a business. So this is strategic, so you do have a sustainable business for the long haul. And integrating, embodying, and planning is working on your business.
It’s just in a slightly different way. So you’re not taking time away—you’re investing time in activities that create long-term results. And I want to let you know you’re not alone here. I just got off a client call. She came to the call feeling like she wasn’t doing enough in her business or wasn’t progressing fast enough in her business. She had a list of things that she really wanted to accomplish that week, but she wasn’t able to do it because one of her sons had graduated, and she spent a lot of time creating a great experience for her family and herself. It’s all about reminding yourself how much you have done. Because in reality, she has done a lot. She is progressing. It’s just not at the speed or the rate or how much that she wanted to do at the time. But when we were able to shift the mindset and then actually do some work on the call, by the time she left that call, she felt so much better and was in a completely different place.
So you just have to remember that sometimes it’s just our brain, our nervous system’s way of trying to keep us safe, and especially if we’re ambitious and motivated, type A person—we want to compete with ourselves and cross off the to-do list and have it be like we’re progressing at this rate. But sometimes, it’s just not realistic for where you are in life. And that doesn’t mean that you can’t have a business. And that doesn’t mean that you can’t still progress because you can. It just might not look exactly the way that you think it does. So it’s learning how to recognize where you really are and all that you have really accomplished. ’Cause like my client, it probably is more than you think it is. And for me, I was laughing ’cause I showed her my to-do list, and I’m like, my brain feels the same way. I had a to-do list that was a lot on there to do in one week. Totally not achievable. I probably could achieve in this week 10% of that list, but that’s okay.
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I’ll get it done in time, and you will too. So there is some inspiration and mindset shifts and some strategy to help you have a really lovely summer—since we’re in it, we’re here now—and as well, help you create one of your best falls yet. So get out there. Start implementing some of this work. If you get stuck, of course, reach out to me, or you can book your one-to-one consult call inquiring about working with me one-to-one or getting into the Instagram Message Makeover this fall. I’m excited to launch that again. Also, make sure you get into the monthly nervous system reset class—the Manifest and Move—to help really embody this work as well and increase your capacity and skill set in your nervous system as an entrepreneur. Okay? All right. I will see you next week.
Bye for now.
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